The world is becoming more and more connected, and remote working environments are the new norm now. Given this growing demand for developers and programmers, companies are now allowing their employees to work from anywhere, in addition to hiring full remote teams to work on implementing the latest technologies.
In this article, we share some useful tips for remote developer teams to help them manage and complete their projects more effectively. Also, our outlined tools help ensure that remote meetings, collaboration, and team management are effective, even when they happen remotely.
Best Practices for Remote Development Teams
Remote software developer teams are here to stay and grow. Take advantage of the following best practices to overcome the challenges of working remotely and boosting quality and productivity.
Use Continuous Agile Planning for Roadmaps and Backlogs Maintenance
The development process should commence by discussing objectives, which leads to story writing, estimating, and forming solutions. It is ideal for remote developers to plan continually by including, checking, and prioritizing functionalities and stories in the backlog each sprint. The best teams should produce at least four sprints of a backlog of sized stories and estimated stubs. When doing this, developer teams have more time to collaborate with stakeholders, develop smooth solutions, and work through dependencies.
Go for Low-code Development
At times, remote teams need to focus on secondary options to build and support applications when they have a number of tasks to do or the application requested is outside of their development capabilities. Low-code development is one such option to speed up your software development. With low-code options, developers can deliver their ideas into the hands of customers quickly, as they are simple to learn and use. In addition, they spend extra time on building features that matter most to end-users while still getting the new functionalities out faster.
Another good part about low-code applications is that they are easy to maintain and scale as the team evolves with time. Due to the involvement of less code, teams can grow more quickly without affecting the development speed or adding needless costs as they scale up their engineering efforts.
Put Testing and Security Earlier
Remote developers should also consider implementing shift-left testing and security strategies, where exhaustive testing is established and automated earlier in the development phase. This approach enables developers to identify and fix problems in the beginning, thereby boosting the status of deployments than growing deployment frequencies.
Automate Approvals for Low-Risk Changes
Spending hours in a change advisory board meeting to seek approval for low-risk application deployments would be the last thing remote development teams like to do. The formality of this process is helpful for operational and security teams, which usually track production incidents back to these change approvals. Together with processes and compliance leaders, developer teams implementing repetitive testing, CI/CD, and shift-left security applications should look into the options to automate low-risk change management.
Secure Their Networks
In these times, remote developers witness a drop in internet connection quality while moving from the office to their own remote setup. Development teams basically work on data-intensive tasks, such as connecting to VMs and extracting vast amounts of code from centralized repositories. Each of these tasks consumes more time than ever because of the limitations of poor connection or the use of cheap VPNs that ensure security and privacy but lack speed when accessing the company network.
To eliminate this problem, remote development teams need to upgrade their internet connection, for which companies should budget money. It should be a part of their IT budget, especially as firms transfer funds from usual office maintenance and use them to support remote workers at scale.
Top Tools to Use For Remote Developers
Working remotely is not unusual for developers anymore, and they can use one of the many tools available. From helping streamline team collaboration to ensuring better time management and keeping track of tasks and performances efficiently, here are some real superheroes for managing remote developer teams:
Communication
Instant messaging has modernized communication, and corporate messaging platforms are essential for any workplace with multiple locations. Nowadays, Microsoft Teams is a widely used group communication software developed to improve team collaboration across a company. Not only can it be used to chat, make a video call, or share files, but users can also explain their ideas using its virtual whiteboard and screen-sharing feature.
Plus, many remote developer teams use Slack for team communication. They can have one-to-one conversations in the form of text messages, audio clips, voice calls, and video meetings. Zoom is another corporate communication tool with file transfer and screen-sharing services available for desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets.
Team Collaboration
Remote programmer teams use collaboration services to store, edit, and share documents with their workforce, especially those in different geographical locations. Collaboration tools enable developers to work together on the same documents in real-time rather than sending files back and forth.
The most popular collaboration tool is G-Suite – an integrated suite of apps required to take care of projects remotely. It has tools to save and edit all the documents and spreadsheets online. Moreover, Google Workspace gives access to shared team calendars and makes it easy to hold meetings, chat with other members, and share quick notes. Microsoft 365 and Dropbox are other good examples of team collaboration.
Project Management
Teams working on many projects simultaneously can take advantage of project management software that enables them to collaborate, communicate, and keep everything managed. These tools have advanced features for planning, scheduling, feedback, file sharing, progress tracking, task monitoring, and a lot more on a single platform.
With tools like Jira, Trello, and Basecamp, developer teams can use resources efficiently and control the stress of finishing big projects remotely. Asana is another impressive project management tool that monitors different initiatives and tasks and gives an overview of the team calendar, project statuses, and pending approvals.
Final Words
Unquestionably, remote teams have their fair share of challenges. To overcome these challenges, stick to the best practices mentioned in this post to ensure your team operating remotely is efficient and productive. Irrespective of the challenges, your remote developer team will evolve if you follow these shared best tips and tools to work with other team members.
